Sunday and I got the job done. It was: to pack up what I couldn’t live without for some number of months.
I stacked no furniture except the fancy office chair. There are some infrastructure pieces, like an RV fridge, an RV mattress, a mobile power supply, and a hot shower in a box. I’m unlikely to use any of that soon. They’re in the cargo trailer because they belong in the trailer, eventually, when it morphs into a camper.
Beyond that, toolboxes, the cream of the pots and pans, some bulk food in fancy buckets, clothes, minimal linens, and a kind of overstuffed version of what you’d pack for a three-week stay in resort. Like, I brought a hand. soap. pump. That’s what I mean by overstuffed.
It fills the small supercab back seat of the truck, and something like half the floor of the trailer, e-bike included. Viewed in that light it seems like shockingly little, and that makes me happy. The rental awaits my kit unloaded into it, of a Monday. Tuesday, I interview.
After that, the job is: house, on land.
On the FB Marketplace that I won’t go near, she found a house solution for under 20K. It’s a really tiny house, like a hundred square feet, and no existing hot water solution, in spite of the fact that there’s a sink and shower. That’s the downside. The upside would be that it’s unbelievably cheap, and would be pretty simple to have up and running completely when the lease on the rental is up in about exactly five months.
Whereas I’d be only started, on an arched cabin–it wouldn’t be habitable yet, in any realistic likelihood, in that short time frame.
Also, the tiny is eleven feet tall, and fully mobile. It would make a nice guest cottage or AirB&B after we replaced it with something more realistic for the long term.
So maybe.
But that’s a topic for another day.
***
Political offhand for this day.
According to no less a radical rag than Bloomberg News:
“1 In 6 American homes … have fallen behind on their energy bills“.
Already fallen behind. It will surely go to a third of American homes, and very probably on to half, come the far solstice.
But oh we are (actually) lucky this time. It’s going to be far, far worse in Europe, where ‘energy prices’ are four and six and eight times what they are in North America (with the exception of a radically nuclear-powered Sweden).
The good news for the average working stiff in say, Britain, is that there’s an actual serious social safety net in place.
The bad news, in for example Germany, is that the boomerang sanctions could easily mean that energy is simply unavailable at any price, subsidized or not. They are already talking about rolling blackouts, and ‘warming shelters’ that are not houses or apartments.
The people will have no one to blame for the crisis but their own feckless, stupid, Atlanticist, NATO-sucking leadership.
And they will, throughout the West. It might even be a hopeful sign, for anyone revolutionarily inclined. No one knows for sure yet.